How do lawyers, judges etc. work with 1000+ pages long documents?
In: Other
By being good at skim-reading, good at picking out the important points that need reading, and – if necessary – hiring other people to read parts and pick out bits that matter.
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At the risk of breaking the “Recent or Current Events” rule, I suspect this links to the 1,794-page document Donald Trump’s legal team filed to get out of having to pay a multi-million dollar judgment in New York. You can [read the document here](https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=oor8_PLUS_SyilUVorLgVywrDfQ==) (obviously a very long pdf).
The first page is the summary. If we’re the court or lawyer we can skip over most of that, picking out a couple of key lines. If we do a lot of this work we’ll know which lines to jump to; we don’t have to read the form, just the response.
Pages 3-4 are the proposed order (staying the judgment). That’s in fairly standard language, so we just have to skim it to make sure it says what we think.
Pages 5-16 are the main arguments. But a lot of that is the statement of facts, setting out what has happened in this case. Anyone familiar with the case (such as the lawyers and judges) can skip over much of that (or get the minions to read it, just in case there are mistakes).
Pages 17-1,479 are attached exhibits, covering applications, judgments, filings etc. from earlier in the case. Again, anyone familiar with this case (the lawyers and judges) have probably read all of these already; they are included for completeness and because they are referred to, but there’s nothing new there.
Pages 1,481-1,508 seems to be a bunch of correspondence between Trump’s lawyers and the judge arguing over things. The Government’s lawyers might need to read this, but the judge doesn’t – it’s not new.
Pages 1,509-1,617 are a load of newspaper articles, tweets, opinion pieces, quotes from videos etc. saying how the judge was being mean to Trump. They’re probably referenced in the legal arguments, but no one needs to read them unless they turn out to be relevant to the actual arguments (for example, if the argument itself is legally nonsense it doesn’t matter how many Fox News articles are written to support its factual claims).
Pages 1,618-1,741 are a bunch of the procedural stuff – the notices of appeal (standard forms, standard wording) along with a load of attached documents that have probably already been filed.
At page 1,742 we finally get the memorandum of law, setting out the legal arguments for the stay. The first few pages are the contents, lists of cases and laws referred to etc. and the background to the case, so the actual argument starts on 1,754. The detailed legal arguments, point by point, begin on 1,763 – the first few pages were a summary – and they conclude on 1,793.
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So what do we actually need to read to understand this document? Page 1. Skim bits of pages 5-16. We can then read pages 1,754-1,763 to see a summary of the legal argument, and if we want to, go into the details from 1,763-1,793.
So of nearly 1,800 pages of document, we only really care about 30-60 of them. Although maybe we get the interns to skim the rest.
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